Polyphasic Sleep 2: Everyman (Day 11)

As you may know, I attempted to adapt to the rather incredible uberman sleep schedule back in summer 2011. The first half-dozen posts on this blog document that process.

When I quit uberman after about a week, I reflected about the various benefits and costs of doing it, ultimately concluding that I would not do it again. Well…

(For the sake of brevity and of people who already know anything about this topic, I’m going to try to avoid explaining polyphasic itself. There is already plenty of that on the internet. If you’re confused by something, google it or comment below and I’ll explain.)

What changed?

Well, first of all, I’m not doing uberman again. I’m doing everyman (~3.3h core sleep at night plus three 20min naps). There are a few other factors that have converged to make this happen though:

I met someone very awesome who does everyman, and met other people who know other successful polyphasers personally. This was really helpful because I had much more immediate evidence that this was indeed working for some people. This was the inspiration/impetus.

I’m working at a software startup that has comfy memory foam mattresses and doesn’t care when I sleep. This gives me lots of flexibility, which is super-important for adaptation.

polyphasicsociety.com. This website didn’t exist when I tried uberman in 2011. While various bloggers were talking about polyphasic, nobody seemed to actually know anything. This site actually provides solid recommendations and cites literature. Unfortunately there has still been virtually no direct research on the subject.

I have discovered the Zeo sleep tracker. Sadly Zeo is out of business, but these are totally worth it and I’d seriously recommend trying to acquire one (eBay, Amazon) if you want to do polyphasic.

I have acquired amazing nap mp3s, created (as far as I know) by Matt Fallshaw. More on these below.

The first steps of adaptation

I’m already 11 days in! Unlike my last attempt, where I decided to blog daily, I’m trying to make this one feel somewhat more normal, and therefore I don’t want to have this huge posting thing. The other part is that it everyman is more normal, because I still have a main night-time sleep. Here’s the story.

After deciding in late March that I wanted to do this, I scheduled my adaptation to start the following weekend. I was already intending to go out Saturday night clubbing, and I figured I just wouldn’t sleep afterwards. It is generally agreed among most polyphasers I’ve talked to that the best way to adapt to everyman is to pretend to adapt to uberman. Furthermore, the best way to adapt to uberman consists of sleeping every 2h instead of every 4h, which is called the naptation or exaptation. So that’s what I did.

After not sleeping since Friday night, I finally took a nap Sunday morning, and proceeded to take naps every 2h for about a day. I was pretty tired in the morning but felt quite competent in the afternoon / evening. (Sidenote on feeling competent while possibly having inadequate self-assessment abilities: I’ve started using Quantified Mind to track my cognitive performance. Unfortunately I didn’t do enough trials before starting adaption to be able to negate practice effects, but at the very least if I ever quit polyphasic or switch to a different version, even temporarily, I should be able to tell how it’s affecting my brain.)

REM naps, glorious REM naps

Then, I started cutting out some of the naps midday. Tuesday morning was crazy. I was utterly exhausted and probably would not have been able to avoid sleeping if it hadn’t been for my friend who stayed over and kept me awake by asking me random questions (and tickling me incessantly when I would doze). Even still I think I crashed a bit during while she was totally asleep. I… don’t remember. Anyway, on the advice of several other polyphasers, I decided to start my core that night. This is a cool part of the story. In my uberman conclusion post, I note under benefits:

I feel like I’m better at napping now, although that will have to be re-examined once I’m no longer sleep deprived. — past!Malcolm

In the year-and-a-half since the uberman experiment, I indeed retained my ability to REM-nap, and while I only tried it when tired, tired is a pretty common state for university students, so it came in handy plenty of times. The other cool result of this was that when I started my adaptation to everyman this month, I was REM-napping a few of my naps from the very first day, and about half of them by Tuesday. Apparently many people take much longer (including myself when I tried Uberman) but my polyphasic friends suggested that I could now add a core.

My Everyman Schedule

My exact schedule. Purple is sleep, black is wake. The circle is a 24h clock with midnight at the top.

It took me a decent amount of time to figure out what schedule would work best for me, but I ultimately settled on:

Core: 01:30-05:00

Nap: 08:30-08:50

Nap: 13:20-13:40

Nap: 19:00-19:20

My core was actually originally going to be like 1:15 but the first few nights I was late anyway so I ended up keeping it at 1:30. I’ve successfully awoken every time, but after my core on nights 1 and 3 I didn’t manage to get myself out-of-bed enough and conked out for another few hours.

The Zeo and phases of sleep

During naps, my Zeo tells me how much sleep I actually got, and what kind. I can virtually always tell when I have REM naps, because I dream, but it’s not nearly as obvious how long I slept. The really good ones, though, where I REM for the whole 20mins (I’ve had I think 3 of these so far) have me wake up feeling like I’ve gone to Narnia. It seriously feels like I’ve been gone for hours, so it’s a weird adjustment to return to a world that was basically like the one I left.

For my core sleep, the Zeo has been hugely helpful in indicating my cycles and how much deep sleep I’m getting (the idea is that REM is gained mostly through naps, and deep (aka SWS / short-wave sleep) mostly during core. There were actually a couple of nights when I got an insanely large amount of deep sleep—2 hours 25 minutes! I only have 2 nights’ of monophasic Zeo data, but this appears to be a solid hour more than I was getting before.

However, I’m much more concerned about REM sleep. I appear to have been getting at least 2 hours when monophasic, which will be tough to replicate polyphasically. I might need 4 naps per day. …although I seem to recall reading that REM is more effective with smaller doses administered frequently throughout the day. Lately I’ve been adding a 10:40am nap, which seems to be very helpful and REMful (one of them was one of the solid 20mins of REM).

The sleep mp3s

Oh man, these are so awesome. Historically I’ve relied on vibrating alarms to annoy me out of bed. I still do that for my core sleep, but for almost all of my naps this time I’ve used this mp3. For length-variants and other polyphasic resources, check out the links on this lesswrong.com comment.

The track is mostly composed of waves, sohttp://blog.myzeo.com/sleep-architecture-again/ft pitched tones, and vague babble (similar to coffivity.com but without coffeeshop sounds) which is pleasant. Then, 20 minutes in, a beautiful, slow, simple synth melody starts, and plays for 2 minutes. At that point, classical guitar comes in, then seconds later piano, then an electric guitar playing rock, followed by some crazy sounds that will make you think you should probably head for cover. I struggle to imagine sleeping through this when it’s playing on headphones. Surprisingly, though, I have never needed this alarming ending. In fact, I become awake/aware almost instantly at the first synth tone. I don’t know how this works, but it feels like magic and it’s so much nicer than having to awaken to beeping, bells, or angry vibrations.

I’m just getting started

This everyman adaptation is going really well. I’ve had a few mess-ups (such as this morning when I managed to sleep for 2 hours sitting in a chair with my computer on my lap. Thank god it didn’t fall off…) but all in all I’m feeling quite confident this will work. I’m already feeling way more rested than I would expect sleeping just 30h/week. Anyway, it’s time for my core! Sweet dreams (:

I just skimmed your article. There are a bunch of issues with generalizing from your own adaptation, most notably that you used caffeine: obviously your naps were of low quality if you were caffeinating yourself. You say in the comments that you HAD to drink coffee. That may have been true for your situation, but that simply means that your situation isn’t conducive to adaptation. An alternative that would work much better is to have friends keep you awake by prodding/shaking/tickling you. This is what I did and it worked quite well.

More seriously, though, generalizing from one example is just a bad plan. So polyphasic sleep went poorly for you. There are a number of reasons why that could have happened:

The reason you propose: that it’s a complete fraud and is basically just sleep deprivation.

Your physiology is incompatible with polyphasic sleep but it works for others.

You didn’t do the adaptation process correctly (see comments about caffeine, above).

Some other factor got in the way.

I strongly urge you not to attempt to give others blanket advice on how to live their lives based on your own attempt which was not particularly well-researched. I mean, if you walked into a gym and picked up a 100lb weight, then tried doing pilates with it and injured your back, would it be reasonable to advise others to avoid weight-rooms because they’re dangerous?

While I haven’t yet done an update post, I’ve been on this sleep schedule for nearly 3 months now and it’s by far my favourite of all of the ways I’ve slept. I once went for a few months with no alarm clock, which was more pleasurable, but the slight pain of feeling tired sometimes is worth being both a nighthawk and an early riser.

I’m currently starting everyman and I would like to have something like a zeo to track my time. Are you aware of any new solution. It seems like buying a used zeo, I wouldn’t be able to do much with it.

Like you I already did try to get into uberman and I seem to be able to nap good. I started from a little sleep deprivation and so far naps had dreams and I naturally woke up.

I’m about to have third core. What is the point of starting out with uberman? Is this just if you can’t nap yet?

I’m not! I’m still using my old zeo but the headbands are pretty gross. It’s annoying they went out of business.

If you can already nap well, uberman may be less important. I think that just going straight into everyman is probably fine. If you’re looking for more of my advice on polyphasic sleep, I recommend this post: So You Want To Sleep Polyphasically

This post is kind of out of date. I have been pretty consistently biphasic (6h core + one 20min nap) for the last 20 months or so… it gets a bit out of whack sometimes when I’m sick, stressed, or traveling, but biphasic sleep works better for me than monophasic ever did, by far.

Although I’m less strictly using alarms now, so sometimes (particularly when I’m feeling a little under the weather) I sleep 7-9 hours in a night. But at other times I’m waking up naturally after 5.5-6h. And I try to take a nap pretty much every day, regardless of how much sleep I got the night before.